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William Robinson, the 2013 artist-in-residence at the Killam Memorial Library, is presenting Brutalist Song II in the Killam atrium on Sunday, May 8. Performances will be thirty minutes each at 2, 3, 4, and 5 p.m.

During his 2013 residency, William developed a sculpture of the Killam that played a “song” as it turned past a sensor. The project was called Brutalist Song, the title referring to the style of architecture of the Killam. Inspired by the building and his time here, William has since developed Brutalist Song II. This presentation involves sculpture and sound, featuring multiple musicians playing horns and an electric organ.

William Robinson lives and works in Halifax. His practice includes a variety of media such as site-specific installation, performance, video, musical composition, sculpture and printed matter. His ongoing research explores how sound and music can extricate social and historical narratives resting dormant within particular sites and built environments. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, having shown in New York, Bergen, and Berlin, as well as in Toronto at Nuit Blanche and in Halifax at Nocturne

Currently he is investigating the material, cultural, and sonic transmutation of certain metal objects and their related manufacturing processes. William is a recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts Audio Research Grant (2016) and he has been long-listed for the Sobey Art Award for the Atlantic region (2016).

William Kowalski is a writer and an independent publisher. He has written five works of literary fiction: Eddie’s Bastard (1999), Somewhere South of Here (2001), The Adventures of Flash Jackson (2003), The Good Neighbor (2004) and The Hundred Hearts (2013). In September 2014, William won the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award for The Hundred Hearts, which he will read from on January 14.

Reviews for The Hundred Hearts:

“This searing novel manages to be a portrayal, both pitilessly accurate and strangely tender, of the toll of battle on soldiers and their families.” — The Globe and Mail

“Timely, beautifully written, and memorable.” — Owen Sound Sun Times

Don’t miss this chance to see William Kowalski in person as he reads from The Hundred Hearts.

This public reading is sponsored by the Canadian Literary Collections Project.

William Robinson, the recently named artist-in-residence at the Killam Memorial Library, is a Halifax-based interdisciplinary artist and graduate of NSCAD (2004). He employs video, performance, sculpture, drawing and other media to investigate the culture of sound and social architecture. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, having shown in New York, Bergen and Berlin, as well as in Toronto at Nuit Blanche and in Halifax at Nocturne. His practice is conceptually based, often rooted in intimate encounters and immediate experiences.

William’s residency at the Killam Library is presented in partnership with the Dalhousie Art Gallery and runs from January 28-March 1, 2013. The residency is funded through HRM’s residency initiative, which benefits artists by providing them with resources including space, time, critical discourse and financial support to deepen their practices, create works, investigate ideas and experiment with materials.

Please join us next Wednesday to learn more about William’s work and his residency in the Killam Library. More information is also available here.

The Kellogg Library has acquired the Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins electronic book collection from Books@OVID. There are 143 books covering the fields of clinical medicine, nursing, pharmacy and pharmacology, physical therapy, life sciences, psychiatry and psychology, and more.

You can access individual titles through Novanet, or link to the whole collection via our e-books webpage or directly through this link. Access is available from on and off campus.

When approaching the collection from the Ovid@Books website, Click “Continue” and then choose “Books”.

A new graphic medicine section has been added to the collection at the Kellogg Health Sciences Library!

Graphic medicine refers to illness or health narratives in the form of comics that can be either fiction or non-fiction materials (U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2018). As an approachable medium, graphic medicine can provide insight into a wide variety of health and medical scenarios, told from both the patient and healthcare provider perspective. Though literature has long been used within medicine to encourage reflection and understanding regarding patient experiences, graphic medicine has only been recognized as a valuable medium for health information within the past decade (Williams, 2012).

A unique feature of graphic medicine publications is their potential to encourage readers, including students, patients, relatives and healthcare providers, to relate to the narrative and show empathy towards the characters (McNicol, 2017). More specifically, graphic medicine can be used to increase public awareness and understanding about illness and health, prepare patients for medical procedures, and assist with patient care decision-making (McNicol, 2017). It can also provide a way for healthcare providers and trainees to better understand how patients experience illness (Green & Myers, 2010).

You can also peruse some of the new titles on the Medical Humanities LibGuide, which includes titles in Halifax and Dalhousie Medicine NB. Pick up a graphic medicine novel and let us know what you think!

A huge thank you to our Kellogg Library Intern – Kristy Hancock – from the School of Information Management. Kristy used the skills developed in her Information Resources Management course, as well health sciences library experience gained during her internship, to curate a short list for the Kellogg Librarians and Staff to review in developing this collection.

“Digitizing the Kipling scrapbooks is part of the Libraries’ ongoing efforts to digitize its archival and special collections and make them broadly available to the world as well as to preserve the unique and rare materials that the library holds. It is hoped that by making these collections more broadly available that new forms of research and scholarship will be enabled through the use of these materials,” said Roger Gillis, Digital Humanities Librarian.

“The entire Kipling Project Team are to be congratulated on a beautifully prepared exhibit that highlights one of the Libraries’ important and valuable collections,” said Michael Moosberger, Associate University Librarian for Archives, Special Collections and Records Management. “The development of this project, which integrates geospatial technology along with high-resolution digitization and sophisticated metadata, will allow students and faculty the opportunity to engage with these historical publications in new and innovative ways. The project also illustrates how the field of digital scholarship is an important and growing part of the Libraries’ mandate and can breathe new life and new opportunities into iconic library resources whose importance to teaching and learning has not diminished.”

About the Kipling Collection

The Dalhousie Libraries Kipling Collection has an international reputation as the most comprehensive collection of Rudyard Kipling’s publications in the world. Containing an exhaustive selection of Kipling’s literary and journalistic works, the Kipling Collection holds important research ephemera and support material by and about Kipling, such as manuscripts, letters, pamphlets, original illustrations included in Kipling’s works, autographs, sketches, and sheet music for poems set to music.

The Kipling Collection also contains the Kipling Collection Scrapbooks: eleven scrapbooks created by notable nineteenth and twentieth century Kipling enthusiasts from England and the United States. There are seven known collectors: Sir William Garth, Ellis Ames Ballard, G. D. Wells, James Todman Goodwin, and three unidentified collectors. (The collectors of these scrapbooks will be explored in a future post in this series.) These scrapbooks are informal compilations, which preserve Kipling’s early journalistic works, as well various versions and editions of poems, short stories, and serials, many of which no longer survive in their original form. The full scrapbooks are available in Dalspace.

The Exhibit features contextual information on Kipling, the scrapbooks, as well as British travel writing, as well as an interactive timeline and map that features a Map exploring some of Kipling’s travels and writing during his time as a journalist in late nineteenth-century India.

Scrapbooking, which may be considered by some a trivial pastime, gives scholars interesting insights. In the case of the Kipling scrapbooks, we can see the works as they were originally printed. This post will focus on the collectors who compiled a selection of works by and about Rudyard Kipling and who chose to arrange these in the form of scrapbooks.

The Digital Kipling Project, an endeavour to digitize and make available these otherwise unseen gems surrounding Kipling’s legacy, got underway in the summer of 2017. Diana Doublet, the Digital Kipling’s Digitization Assistant, carefully digitized the content of a variety of scrapbooks created by several notable nineteenth and twentieth century Kipling enthusiasts: Sir William Garth, Ellis Ames Ballard, G. D. Wells, James Todman Goodwin, and three unidentified collectors.

These scrapbooks, informal and sometimes haphazard compilations of works written by or about Kipling, were acquired by James McGregor Stewart for his prestigious Kipling collection, which was donated to Dalhousie University in 1954. The Kipling Collection shows Stewart’s admiration of Kipling and the legacy Kipling left in the world of literature and culture.

The scrapbooks likewise demonstrate a regard for a figure whose impact was far-reaching in the British Empire and beyond. Not only do they preserve early works of Kipling’s and some of the criticisms and responses to his work during Kipling’s life, but the scrapbooks also reveal something of the scrapbook collectors themselves.

For example, The “Letters of Marque” surrounds Kipling’s early journalistic works for the Anglo-Indian newspaper The Pioneer Mail. These “Letters” are preserved in their entirety, clipped directly from the Pioneer as they were printed from December 14, 1887 to February 28, 1888, and carefully pasted and organized into a handsome leather and paper bound scrapbook.

The scrapbook the letters appear in, titled Extracts from the Pioneer Mail: Being Rudyard Kipling’s Contributions Thereto During the Years 1887-1888, was created by Sir William Garth (1854–1923), a British lawyer and advocate serving in Kolkata from 1885–1913. During Garth’s appointment in India, he became an admirer of Kipling’s writings, and collected newspaper clippings of Kipling’s works and pasted these into his scrapbook.

The digitized scrapbook, along with several others, is now available on Dalspace. In addition, a “Letters of Marque” exhibit will be released this fall as part of the Dalhousie Libraries Digital Exhibit initiative. In this exhibit, not only will each “Letter” be available for viewing, an interactive map will be accessible to view the locations and landmarks Kipling visited in India while writing the “Letters.”

Pages from the Garth scrapbook.

Following Garth’s death in 1923, his impressive collection of arts and letters were sold to Sotheby’s in London where a Philadelphia barrister, Ellis Ames Ballard, acquired the Garth scrapbook. Ballard (1861–1938), also a devotee and collector of Kipling’s works, valued Garth’s scrapbook immensely. In his book, My Kipling Collection, Ballard states: “The Garth Album is of such importance that I have included it in the catalogue proper.” It is presumed that Stewart acquired the Garth scrapbook following Ballard’s death, and entered it into the collection that we have today.

Garth’s scrapbook, as well as the remaining ten scrapbooks compiled by the other seven collectors, are testaments to the nineteenth and twentieth century reading experience. Demonstrating a dedication to preserving ephemeral media, these scrapbooks reveal a time when the average person could curate their own accumulation of information and make sense of the world around them. While this practice may find its equivalent today in the form of bookmarking or hashtagging, the process of scrapbooking is involved in what scrapbook scholar Ellen Gruber Garvey calls, in her book Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, “gestures of preservation,” the physical process of reading, flipping, selecting, clipping, organizing, and finally, pasting material into a physical book dedicated to this activity.

Garth’s scrapbook in particular expresses his relationship with Britain, and his admiration for the “Letters’” “globe-trotting Englishman” who represented his nation’s interests. His loyalty to his country is glued into the pages of his scrapbook, effectively curating Kipling’s early writings and Garth’s own sense of national belonging. Had Garth not felt the compulsion to collect these works of Kipling’s, the original format of the “Letters of Marque” may have been lost forever.

A number of the Kipling scrapbooks have now been digitized and are available on Dalspace.

This post is the first in a series that will highlight the Dal Libraries’ Digital Kipling project. The project involves digitizing and contextualizing the Rudyard Kipling Scrapbooks — part of the internationally renowned Kipling Collection held in the Dalhousie Libraries’ Special Collections.

The Dalhousie Libraries’ Kipling Collection has an international reputation as the most comprehensive collection of Rudyard Kipling’s publications in the world. Containing an exhaustive selection of Kipling’s literary and journalistic works, the Kipling Collection holds important research ephemera and support material by and about Kipling, including manuscripts, letters, pamphlets, original illustrations from Kipling’s works, autographs, sketches, and sheet music for poems set to music. Kipling was one of the most popular authors in the UK in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is the author of The Jungle Book.

The Kipling Collection also contains the Kipling Collection scrapbooks: 11 scrapbooks created by notable nineteenth and twentieth century Kipling enthusiasts from England and the United States. There are seven collectors behind the 11 scrapbooks: Sir William Garth, Ellis Ames Ballard, G. D. Wells, James Todman Goodwin and three unidentified collectors. (The collectors of these scrapbooks will be explored in a future post as part of this series.) These scrapbooks are informal compilations, which preserve Kipling’s early journalistic works, as well various versions and editions of poems, short stories, and serials, many of which no longer survive in their original form.

The Digital Kipling Project team of Diana, Roger, and Jessica gingerly explore one of the scrapbooks, brittle with age.

This summer, the Dalhousie Libraries’ Digital Kipling Project team will be digitizing the scrapbooks and creating a digital humanities exhibit via the Libraries’ new digital exhibit space using Omeka, an open source web-publishing platform. The project team consists of Roger Gillis (project manager/digital humanities librarian), Diana Doublet (digitization assistant), and Jessica Ruzek (digital exhibit assistant). The team is working with digital archivist Creighton Barrett and special collections librarian Karen Smith to bring this project to fruition.

By digitizing the scrapbooks, this project will enhance the accessibility of the Kipling Collection, provide contextual and background information crucial to the scrapbooks, and will further support research surrounding Kipling. The Digital Kipling online exhibit will launch in the fall of 2017. Updates and information on the site can be found here: http://kipling.library.dal.ca

Dr. James Raffan is a prolific writer, speaker, geographer and Kickass Canadian (kickasscanadians.ca/james-raffan). Over the years he has produced a number of bestselling books, including his most recent work, Circling the Midnight Sun: Culture and Change in the Invisible Arctic, which he will read from on March 10. Circling the Midnight Sun was a finalist for the 2015 BC National Non-Fiction Book Prize and named a “best book” of 2014 by the Globe and Mail.

He has also written for media outlets including Canadian Geographic, National Geographic, Explore, The Globe and Mail, as well as for CBC Radio and The Discovery Channel.

Praise for Circling the Midnight Sun:

“To me it’s the most exciting region on the planet, and while we all talk about how it, the Arctic, is being affected by climate changer, how many of us have actually been there to find out first hand? James Raffan has and he takes “being there” very seriously – just look at where he went. Sir John Franklin would envy this voyage! But thanks to the trip, James answers today’s big Arctic questions and you may well be surprised at some of the answers. Circling the Midnight Sun is a fascinating read.”— Peter Mansbridge, Chief Correspondent and Anchor, CBC News, The National.

“James Raffan has taken an unusual and difficult journey—around the world in Arctic latitudes. In doing so, he has visited a diverse sampling of what Canadian Inuit would call “ukiuqtaqturmiut”—the people of the Arctic, an agglomeration of races, languages and cultures united only by their residence in the globe’s northern-most countries and territories. This wonderful and informative volume has given voice to their stories— human stories— often lost or ignored in a world newly-enamoured of the Arctic but increasingly focused on the physical or economic aspects of climate change.”— Kenn Harper, author of Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo and In Those Days: Collected Writings on Arctic History. Volume 1: Inuit Lives.

“By tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage, James Raffan puts a human face on the circumpolar North.”— Michael Byers, author of International Law and the Arctic & winner of the 2013 Donner Prize

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear James read and exchange ideas about one of Canada’s most mystical regions.

This public reading is sponsored by the Canadian Literary Collections Project.

Award-winning writer/designer/visual literature pioneer Warren Lehrer is coming to Halifax to present a multimedia performance/reading of his new “illuminated novel,” A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley.

Lehrer is known as a pioneer in the fields of visual literature and design authorship. His books have been acclaimed for capturing the shape of thought and reuniting the traditions of storytelling with the printed page.

A Life in Books, Lehrer’s first novel, contains 101 books within it, all written by Lehrer’s protagonist— who is a controversial author that finds himself in prison looking back on his life and career. In this funny and thought provoking performance, Lehrer presents an overview of Bleu Mobley’s life in books via many of Mobley’s cover designs and other biographical materials, including animations and video performances of Mobley book excerpts.

Don’t miss this chance to see William Lehrer’s multimedia presentation of A Life in Books in person!

Reviews for A Life in Books:

“In A Life In Books, Warren Lehrer has written a profound commentary on this nausea-inducing unique moment in the grand transition from Silly Mind to Machine Mind. Amusingly and smartly enough, he may have helped transition ‘the last great American novel’ to the first ‘great illustrated novel’ which is how novels started. A Life In Books is brilliant, beautiful, delicious for eyes and mind.”– Andrei Codrescu poet, novelist, journalist, public radio commentator

“In Warren Lehrer’s ingenious, one-of-a-kind novel, A Life In Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, we see all the covers of all 101 books supposedly written by the narrator over the last several decades… A tour-de-force!”
– Kurt AndersenStudio 360

“For anyone who has ever resisted judging a book by its cover, now’s your chance: In A Life In Books, author and graphic design visionary Warren Lehrer crafts a vivid kaleidoscopic odyssey that frames one man’s life through not one, but one hundred different books—and book jackets. In this quirky, yet unmistakably modern evocation of the illuminated manuscript, Lehrer’s book reminds us that we are what we do. And, for that matter, what we publish.”
– Jessica Helfand graphic designer, writer, educator, founding editor Design Observer

“A meticulously illustrated chronicle… Lehrer’s 101 cover designs for Mobley’s books are pitch perfect. And like the best film title sequences, which establish moods or introduce plotlines, these fictional covers are vehicles by which Lehrer illuminates Mobley’s tale of success and failure… Lehrer has created a parallel art world”
– Steven Heller The Atlantic

This presentation is jointly sponsored by Dalhousie Libraries, the Mount Library at Mount Saint Vincent University, the Patrick Power Library at Saint Mary’s University, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Library and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Department of Design.A special thank you to the Halifax Central Library for their support of this event.